In intervening years
by Karanguni
Summary: Sector Seven burns below. Then Tseng is paid his due rights: for loyalty, and trust, and the practice of looking for some small freedom.


_Every day I examine my character in three aspects:  
I am disloyal in my designs for others;  
I am untrustworthy in my dealings with friends;  
I have failed to practice what have been passed on to me._

* * *

Loyalty is trait much desired in Shinra, much lauded and much praised. Loyalty is a descriptor of your service: the word seems archaic in a steel girder city filled with new, new men, but that its prophets wear suits detracts nothing from its power, which is old and still influences all the king's men. _Fealty_, another ancient device, is underscored in two red words on a square shield; all sides equal, all men safe. In the absence of religion, Midgar worships her sun: electric power from the Electric Power Company, mako flowing through her veins like green, green gold. This is who she is, and her people love her the way all urchins love the streets - with souls hating smog, crashing noises and asphalt, with bodies that would not know what to do without the glare off of tarmac, or the shade of the Plate above. Hallelujah. Praise those who withstand, not those who withhold. Shinra built this city with the mind of one man, the money of another, and a million hands. To leave is unthinkable. Where would you go?

So be loyal, all faithful, and watch for the apostles, vengeful and spreading the word. There are few as blood-bound as the Turks; the scent of it follows them everywhere, as pungent as old money and knotted silk. Their numbers change, but not their number: you are a Turk until you are not - you do not change, you are not amorphous. Your nature is set, even if it must be nurtured. Tseng has seen, now, Turks of both sorts: those who are born - like Cissnei, out of the city's bowels - and those who are bred, some of whom never emerge from behind Hojo's glass-panelled hallways, the laboratory doors transparent and oblique. The Science department crucifies the unwilling, and the Army will take the unwary. The Turks, so very loyal to the end, take whatever is left, scraps of flesh and men. Shinra burns and breaks and sunders everything else, beats and bends and turns them all superlative, and subhuman.

This is how loyalty is rewarded, as Tseng has seen out through to the latter days:

They gave him, in exchange for his service, a roof over his head, clothes on his back, an albatross about his neck. Then Veld, older and wiser and classically trained in the nature of Midgar's politics; who first put a gun in Tseng's hand and then taught him how to use it. With Veld they gave him a man to believe in, an excellent way to later teach Tseng the error of such ways. Shinra is a country full of nepots, families and legacies, especially amongst her best men. One look at his long-lost child and Veld returned to seek old homes like a prodigal. So now Tseng, left with men he's learned by rote how to herd, learns by instinct how to lead.

Loyalty: take what you can, burn everything after you.

Sector Seven blazes below him with the fire of the self-righteous; evolutionary, selective, necessary for survival. Tseng re-ascends up into the sky, looking down at his handiwork, and is - for now - satisfied.

The Tower, when he returns to it, is an empty chapel. Urban Development is scattered, its floor all silent now that its members are cast along the streets checking structural soundness and heading evacuation procedures. The public relations team must have finished long before, writing the new history that will appear on every television screen and broadcast to every PHS. The night is young, like Shinra's new President risen up into imperium. This all registers, a faint and nominal changing of wind that Tseng's identified before. Striding through the corridors, up and up and up towards the top of his world, Tseng knows that he lives in uncertain times. That gives him some comfort.

Here is Shinra's motto on trust: believe. Believe in the word, passed on from Director to Director and down to you, the masses. Remember Lazard Deusericus, who knew every SOLDIER by name; know now Reeve Tuesti, who can walk the sectors with his eyes closed and still know where he is. Believe as well that Shinra _brings brighter futures_, here and there and everywhere where mako flows to fill fifty gil barrels and cross-continental pipelines. To each city, new homes and new energy. To each family, warmer rooms, and warmer winters. Mining becomes refining: safer, subtler, affording higher education and better working hours, conditions and wages. No more to Corel, where men get lost in the earth and never come out the same again. Believe also in your colleagues who work with you, in the integrity of Shinra's scientists who care for you, the solidity of her Army which protects you, and the efficacy of her city, which is your city. Shinra provides.

The price of trust is this, paid by Tseng, personally and in his name on paper, sealed with wax and by silence:

Remember Lazard Deusericus, bastard son who was never recognised and who died, by all means and accounts, alone and in exile. His body lies scattered: part decayed to the wind, and the small physical remnants of bone and tailored cloth taken and put into a crude dugout underneath a flowering Dumbapple tree. Know now Reeve Tuesti, who spies because he does not believe in trust, or trust in belief, and that is well founded: right now, he digs an eighth of his dream of a better, brighter future back up from rubble, and probably brings mangled bodies and livelihoods with him. Better those who died under the Plate than the miners in Corel, though; they who had only ever known an honest life and who were cheated out of their inheritance by false gil and falser truths. Whatever might have gone to them goes to the departments instead: to boiling monsters _in potentia_ and stasis, to a pedigreed war hero who snaps at the leash, to a metropolis slowly unstacking like a child's toy in a child's hands, paralleled by the past of a province put to a colonialised right: Wutai to the West, full of graves bleeding nutrients to feed new materia. Gloria, gloria.

The elevator spits Tseng, and his past, out on the 69th level of the Tower, which sits stark and proud and unashamed of everything it is. He walks forward, since there is nothing behind him but glass and an endless drop. Rufus Shinra sits just beyond the doors, at a table sitting with Turks which he calls _his,_ so Tseng supposes - since he calls them _his_ as well - they must share whatever empire is left for Rufus' ambitions to conquer, even as Midgar burns. He sits there, playing poker. Reno and Rude play with him, Elena plays to him.

'President Shinra,' Tseng says.

Rufus looks at him from where he's sitting, poised, and nods. 'Pull up a chair.'

Tseng does so, and they deal him in. The clock on the wall ticks a silent two am hour out to the unlistening room. Tseng plays to play against Rufus. They deal cards, cards, cards. 'You're here at last,' Tseng says, when he has his hand.

Rufus doesn't look up. 'It's been a while since I've been back in Midgar,' he replies, his words light and abbreviated like the four, five years that have passed since he first attempted regicide, patricide and apotheosis. Now he tries arson, murder and blackmail, looking for a freedom to decide his own future, or maybe just simply to content himself.

What, Tseng thinks, loyal Turk he, man doesn't want that? 'I hear,' he says to Rufus, without censure and with the voice of someone who has done worse, 'that you made your inaugural speech to an audience of terrorists. I doubt it'll court you the popular opinion.'

"Freedom fighter" is simply terminology, like "villain".

Rufus' lips twist, whether into a smile or a grimace is anyone's guess. Because this is what Rufus Shinra was given, for loyalty: a father who sent him abroad, a brother he never knew, a mother he never had, an exile that he returned from by means increasingly violent. And this is what Rufus Shinra was given, for trust: backfired and empty plans that ricocheted against a sixteen year old child who planned for liberty and got incarceration. _Alea jacta est,_ the die is cast. So this is how Rufus Shinra will practice what was passed onto him, from father to the son:

'Let them hate,' he shrugs, showing a hand of five spades, 'so long as they fear.'

Tseng lifts one shoulder and tosses down a flush of clubs; a lesser suite, but mirrored to Rufus' like a foreign brother.

Tomorrow they will go looking for some Promised Land, if it exists at all; they will go searching, searching again.


End file.
